Sugar Cube Sculpture

We made sugar cube sculptures. What a fun and surprising lesson in building, painting, and dissolving!

Materials

Box of sugar cubes

Glue bottle

Sturdy base to glue onto

Paint in squeezy bottles

Boxes of sugar cubers were harder to find than I thought, but I ultimately found them at our big supermarket (and bought 2!). We used scrap wood for the base, basic Elmer’s school glue, and Nancy Bottles for the paint.

I suggested that we could build a sculpture with the sugar cubes, and presented N with the materials. That’s all she needed to hear before she began to glue the cubes onto the panel.

And stack them up tall.

You can see that this isn’t the strongest structure in the world!! I filled some Nancy Bottles with watered down BioColor paint, which my daughter then squeezed all over the sculpture. Because the water acted as a dissolving agent, if I were to do this again I’d use straight-up paint without the additional water.

It’s looking a little patriotic, no?

And it end up in this beautiful heap of swirly, melting color. Not exactly what I imagined when we started, but it did lead to some wonderful conversations about dissolving. We only used about 1/10 of the sugar cubes to make the sculpture, so why not set up a dissolving experiment with the rest of the cubes?!

The next day N turned the remaining cubes into sugar water in under five minutes. It was quick, but what a great lesson and experience!

We are on the same page!! I love that you used food coloring, keeping the sugar entirely edible (although using paint kept my daughter from eating the sculpture. hee hee). Thanks for sharing the link — I just love all your projects and imagine that your art space must feel a lot like mine.

Super cute! What a lot of great ideas you have here – I’m going to have to try many of these with my boys. I don’t know if I can find sugar cubes here (I live in Costa Rica), but if so I will definitely do this!